When I turned 30 in November last year, I said that this year would be one where I did a lot of changes, and I've lived up to that - just not quite in the way I thought I would. I got a lot of stuff going in the first quarter of the year, and then a huge amount of it has gone on hold. Whether that's good or bad is still undecided, but I've still changed a lot, but not in the ways the work was planned to change me.

  I don't know quite what happened really, except that all of a sudden aspiring to the things I should have when I'm 30 lost it's appeal, and I needed to spend some time working out what was really important to me, I still haven't made any real decisions, but I'm back to knowing some of the things that still don't appeal to me at all. Some of them have changed over the years, but others, well, they've not changed at all.

  For instance, I know now that I do want to end up buying a house, and may even need to end up getting a mortgage to do it (up 'til now there's been the intention to buy a property and work on it myself, bringing it up to scratch etc.) but the problem still comes because I can't see myself ever wanting to be in a "proper" job. I may need to do it, or something similar, in order to get the mortgage, but I don't know, I just can't see it being me long-term, the entire "same job for five, ten, fifteen years" type of mentality. Long term, I think that the only thing I can really see myself doing is becoming properly, fully self-employed. It's the only thing that suits my temprament, my body clock, and (once I've sorted out motivation stuff) just suits me in general.

  And really that's a lot of what this last year has been about. It's been making me realise properly the things that work for me, the things that make me happy, and suit the way I do things. I've done my best over the last few years to try and fit in with how most people want to do things, how they live and so on, and it's just not me. I don't know why - hell, if I did know why then it would make my life a lot easier, I'd be able to change the way I am, or at least understand it a bit better. But I don't, so I just have to accept that these things are part of my personality. There are just parts of "normal life" that simply don't do it for me. I wish they did - the fact that they don't work for me has cost me more than one partner, and that's just another facet of all of it.

  I don't even know why it doesn't appeal - I don't know why the things that the great majority of people seem to find so important simply bring me out in shudders - or at least, it leaves me totally numb. The lifestyle of all the career (I still stick with the dictionary deifnition of career as "to ricochet wildly from place to place"), mortgage for 25 years, marriage, etc. has never appealed - some of it I know I now want to sort out, but it's still more likely to be on my terms than on "it's the way everyone does it".

  Over the last three or four years, I've come round to some of the ideas, some of those things I now want to sort out - primarily because I'm kind of tired of being as rootless as I have been, and maybe it's time to settle down a bit. I do kind of want to buy a house, to have something where I'm not constantly at the whim of landlords and letting agencies. It feels pretty strange for me to want something that up til now has always left me cold, but it's certainly turning out that way.

  Of course, the fact is that the entire mortgage thing still brings me out in a cold sweat - that's a bit too much all at once - but I know I'll have to get one, rather than what I used to want to do of simply saving up some money, buying a shell then doing it all the way I want. That's still the long-term idea, the final part of the chain, but looking at it logically (and, if I'm honest, looking at it long-term, which is also something of a first) I know now that I can't dive straight into that. I need to have a place sorted to live in, that I own as soon as possible, and that then becomes somewhere to start from. It's realistic - doesn't mean I like it all that much still, but it's the way things will work best for me. Maybe I'm just growing up - I don't know, it doesn't feel like that, because the other stuff is still as daft as ever, but I do think it's at least getting slightly more sensible, or at least more logical.

  Anyway, I don't know - there's a general plan that I'm forming up for the next year, and this seems as good a time to start it as any. I've just renewed the webspace for another 12 months, starting on the 26th September. I'm not sure of all of it yet, but I might just end up making a new section, where I can write about things as they progress, Then again, I might just leave it here in the thoughts section, and work on it from there. I'll write more over the next week, seeing how I want to sort things over the next year, and work from there. I'm not sure if it'll be good or bad, over the year - it'll be good to list the successes, and it'll probably suck arse to list the failures and setbacks, but it's a thought. And what the hell, it's my site, so if it all goes horrible, I can always just delete that section and run away...

  So - there'll be more on this in the next week, and we'll just have to see how things go from there. It'll be a fun journey, if nothing else. That's the plan, anyway. The reality? Only time will tell.